Joe Shute reports from Monrovia in Liberia, the epicentre of the world’s worst
ever Ebola epidemic, where one girl has lost 11 members of her family

In Monrovia’s Logan Town slum, 14-year-old Teneh Ntvor sits on a plastic stool, listening to the hymns drifting over from the Free Pentecostal Church opposite. Inside the peeling concrete shell, a group of women in white linen smocks shake sasas (Liberian drums) and chant in Kissi, one of the many local dialects, “I am in your care Lord, please take care of me”.

They sing to protect themselves from Ebola, the most terrifying experience this impoverished community has ever faced. But for Teneh, it is already too late. The virus has torn through her home, killing 11 members of her family. Last Friday, she walked out of one of Monrovia’s newly-constructed emergency treatment units clutching a certificate saying she had survived Ebola, but there was nobody left to go home to.

Her eyes, partially covered by her faded cotton headscarf, glisten as she reels off the names of the dead. “I have lost everybody,” she says.

Teneh caught the virus by caring for her grandmother. “She was sick and even though she was getting worse, she wouldn’t go to the hospital. I looked after her, but then she died in the house. I was taken to the emergency treatment clinic and was there for two weeks before I recovered.”

Since her return to Logan Town, she has been evicted by her landlord and many in her community have shunned her, terrified, even though she is now immune, that she will bring Ebola into their homes.

“Now I am staying with a woman who is taking care of me. Everybody else has abandoned me. I had friends before but they don’t see me. I am worried for the future, but I want to go back to school. I want to become a nurse and help people.”

Liberia, and in particular the slums of its capital, Monrovia, has been the epicentre of the world’s worst ever Ebola epidemic, which started in Guinea a year ago this month. On Wednesday, the World Health Organisation warned the global death toll has now risen above 6,000 out of 17,145 cases – while the number of unreported victims is feared to be many thousands more.

Liberia accounts for more than half of the current number of deaths, although its status as the worst affected country in West Africa may soon change, with at least 1,400 new confirmed cases recorded in neighbouring Sierra Leone in the past three weeks.

In Monrovia, a crowded, chaotic city squeezed in between sea and swamp, Ebola has run rampant through its one-and-a-half million inhabitants. The last official population count for West Point and Bushrod Island - the city’s two largest slums - was 240,000, but it is thought as many as 400,000 could be living among the patchwork of corrugated iron roofs and twisting alleyways. Neighbourhoods such as Logan Town (situated on Bushrod Island) have become breeding grounds for a virus spread so easily by human contact.

But through the work taking place on the ground here, the city is starting to regain control. Even though its schools and hospitals remain closed and its inhabitants discouraged from touching one another in public, the national state of emergency has been declared over.

Hotspots of infection are still flaring up - only yesterday it was confirmed that a UN peacekeeper has contracted Ebola and 16 people who came into contact with the soldier quarantined - but the number of cases in the capital has reduced to about a hundred a week.

Life, slowly, is returning to something approaching normal, albeit still punctuated by the howling sirens of ambulances and red pick up trucks driven by men in full personal protection equipment, off to fetch another body.

The cases may be in decline, but an even greater challenge awaits. As currently experienced in Sierra Leone, the nature of Ebola is that it spikes, fast - particularly in areas like Logan Town where people live together 20 or more to a house. Teneh’s story shows how quickly the virus can destroy an entire family.

The current fear among humanitarian experts for Liberia is that, as it finally begins to contain the outbreak, complacency will creep in and the virus will return as intensely as before. To convince people that this crisis is far from over, the message “Ebola Is Real” - daubed on signs lining Monrovia’s main traffic-clogged thoroughfares - is this week being changed to “Ebola Must Go”.

It is here where the Masanga Mentor Initiative – supported by the Telegraph as part of its Christmas Charity Appeal – has become such a crucial weapon. So far, the initiative which is formed between the UK-funded Masanga Hospital in Sierra Leone, and the Liberia-based Mentor Initiative, has trained 160 community health volunteers who are out working in Monrovia’s slums every single day. By January, this network will have increased to 400 and extended out to the nearby city of Paynesville, where this week a flare up of 20 suspected Ebola cases from one small community alone was recorded. At the same time, it is also expanding its network across Sierra Leone.

The volunteers reside in the areas they serve, and have been educated by the charity to monitor infection control, as well as providing support for survivors and the bereaved in communities crippled by the disease. They come, not in quarantine suits – the overuse of which has been blamed for spreading an “epidemic of fear” – but in white T-shirts and clutching notebooks.

As the depth of their training and numbers increase, so the scope of their role grows. Oxford-educated Dr Samafilan Ainan, the coordinator for the volunteers on the ground in Monrovia, says their work is not just about prevention and support, but finding cases as well. “That is why we go house to house.”

One of the Logan Town volunteers, 40-year-old James Davids, patrols its chaotic dirt roads with a gold crucifix hanging around his neck. He remembers well Liberia’s ruinous civil wars, which raged between 1989 and 2003, killing 250,000 people, and says Ebola has been even worse.

“This community has been very badly affected by Ebola; it is almost like another civil war. It is a disease that is scarier than bullets and it kills entire families. I have seen lots of cases where people were lying dead in the street, their bodies just rotting on the ground. In September, one of my friend’s families got sick: they all died, only one child survived.

“We pray to get rid of it in this country. But even when it leaves here we need to help our neighbours in Sierra Leone and Guinea and across West Africa.”

Education is key to their work. Many living here still believe Ebola is a man-made virus, imported into Liberia to make money. The chlorine spray used by health workers to douse infected homes has been blamed in some quarters for causing the deaths. People continue to hide sick relatives at home and then embalm and bury their bodies in secret, infecting themselves in the process. Even the singers in Logan Town’s Pentecostal Church believe Ebola is due to unearthly “visions”.

Such rumours, says Kevin McCauley, chairman of the area of Logan Town we visit, are the product of fear. Earlier in the summer, three people died from the virus in his home of 16 family members, and he was placed in quarantine.

When a household has been tainted by Ebola, he says, “everybody is afraid of you.” But the community health volunteers are helping to rebuild such divisions. “They are going out there and talking to people every day and making a huge difference.”

As we walk, crowds of children skittering around us, we encounter the odd heckle - but the community, by and large, are receptive. Three women in bright skirts peel leaves of corn and ask the volunteers to inquire about their malaria medication. Another group mashing cassava leaves with wooden poles listen patiently as they are told about the importance of keeping a bucket of chlorinated water nearby to wash their hands. In the centre of the capital, one stands outside almost every building; not so in the slums.

One of the tasks for the volunteers is to try and discover the whereabouts of an Ebola survivor who recently returned to the community and infected his wife by having unprotected sex. The man had been told that while survivors are immune, they can still transmit it for three months afterwards through sexual intercourse. His wife has since died, and he has fled.

The volunteers, whose ages range from teenagers to those in their 60s, have become experts in the virus. The health worker population has been decimated here, and many hope that, when the outbreak is over, they will take their places in clinics and hospitals. But for now, they stay on the streets, under no illusion as to the scale of the remaining task at hand.

“We are talking to people and telling them we are still in a battle for survival in this country,” says 29-year-old Olando Farley. “Ebola is still here. We cannot relax at all. Otherwise, it will come back for us.”

For more information or to donate to the Masanga Mentor Initiative - or the Telegraph’s two other Christmas charities, The Abbeyfield Society and Medical Detection Dogs - see the page opposite or visit telegraph.co.uk/charity